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enCopyright 2015 Wearable World Inc.http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rssTue, 31 Mar 2015 14:50:00 -0700Why You Need To X-Ray Your Data Center<!-- tml-version="2" --><p><em>Guest author John Gentry is vice president of marketing and alliances at <a href="http://www.virtualinstruments.com">Virtual Instruments</a>.</em></p><p>The tree in your front yard may be a lot like your data center. It has a lot of stories to tell, and if you cut it down, the circles in the stump may reveal periods of drought, stretches of good weather, an instance of insect infestation or scars from a fire. The total visibility could cover years of history.&nbsp;But you have to cut the tree down to see it all.</p><p>Similarly, your data center's equipment and software can reveal clues about your company’s approach to IT. But&nbsp;getting that visibility into your IT environment is a lot harder than chopping down a tree (though the frustration could have you reaching for an ax).</p><div tml-image="ci01c77b77b00199de" tml-image-caption="" tml-render-layout="inline"><figure><img src="http://a1.files.readwrite.com/image/upload/c_fill,cs_srgb,dpr_1.0,q_80,w_620/MTI4MjA2ODY0NjI5NDI4MTk0.jpg" /><figcaption></figcaption></figure></div><p>Over time, as aging data centers reach toward the cloud, their infrastructure has only grown more complex. Old mainframes from the 1970s or 1980s may still chug along today. Other rings in the "trunk" of your data center could reveal the shift to client/server architecture in the '90s, distributed computing a decade or so ago, and today’s virtualized, cloud-oriented solutions.&nbsp;</p><blockquote tml-render-layout="inline"><p><strong>See also: <a href="http://readwrite.com/2014/12/08/mesos-mesosphere-datacenter-os-brad-silverberg-q-and-a">"Mr. Windows" Bets Big On The Mesosphere Datacenter OS</a></strong></p></blockquote><p>Far from ancient history, all of those factors may still be alive in your organization, struggling to work together so modern customers can have the always-available, mobile-friendly experiences they expect.&nbsp;Unfortunately, this rising complexity, combined with stagnant budgets and staffing rates, can hamper the transparency necessary for healthy performance.&nbsp;</p><h2>A Brief History Of Data Center Performance Visibility&nbsp;</h2><div tml-image="ci01c77ba9a001efe2" tml-image-caption="" tml-render-layout="inline"><figure><img src="http://a5.files.readwrite.com/image/upload/c_fill,cs_srgb,dpr_1.0,q_80,w_620/MTI4MjA3MDgwMTgzMDc2MTE0.jpg" /><figcaption></figcaption></figure></div><p>The gap between a dynamic IT infrastructure and the ability to effectively manage it goes back as far as the mainframe, which was really the first version of the cloud. A shared system with information operations (IO) latency requirements and different workloads, the mainframe delivered phenomenal performance management because it was closed. But it was expensive and required deep technical expertise to maintain.&nbsp;</p><p>When the industry moved to client/server systems, we saw the first wave of IT democratization and a wave of performance tools in the shape of enterprise systems management (ESM). Another 10 years down the road, network performance management (NPM) became the tool of the day as data centers connected out to their customers and partners and had to operate interdependently.&nbsp;</p><p>Today, data centers are interconnected and virtualized all the way down the stack.&nbsp;But the business logic often exists deep within the layers of systems already deployed. ESM and NPM have been marginalized by a myriad of tools that deliver insight into one layer or another, and the comprehensive visibility gap has only widened with virtualization. The fact that most data centers are heterogeneous only exacerbates the problem, as staff struggle to juggle one vendor’s management tools alongside multiple others.&nbsp;</p><blockquote tml-render-layout="inline"><p><strong>See also: <a href="http://readwrite.com/2014/03/06/data-centers-cloud-computing">Cloud, Schmoud—To Really Succeed, Web Companies Need Their Own Data Centers</a></strong></p></blockquote><p>The quest for faster, better, cheaper (or at least cost-effective) performance management raises plenty of questions. What types of silos are you monitoring? Applications? Servers? Networks? Something else? And what about downtime?</p><p>In nearly every industry, the expectation for availability, which once factored in some measure of downtime, is now 24/7. In the financial sector, for example, high-frequency traders can lose big when systems falter for mere milliseconds. Slow-loading e-commerce sites will eventually tank. And health care organizations must avoid outages at all costs to ensure patient safety and consistent functionality throughout facilities. Not many industries can forgive poor performance, regardless of how difficult it is to address.&nbsp;</p><p>Nearly every company is a technology company now, because practically all deliver products or services via some kind of Internet or mobile interface. They must have a firm grasp on performance issues and how to fix them before they corrupt the customer experience. &nbsp;</p><h2>The Challenge For Technology Companies</h2><div tml-image="ci01c77b8a2001efe2" tml-image-caption="" tml-render-layout="inline"><figure><img src="http://a3.files.readwrite.com/image/upload/c_fill,cs_srgb,dpr_1.0,q_80,w_620/MTI4MjA2OTQ1NDI4NDc4NDMw.jpg" /><figcaption></figcaption></figure></div><p>One of the biggest issues is that IT and staffing budgets haven’t grown on par with the increase in complexity. You can't slack on performance, not if your company wants to attract new customers and retain existing ones. So your qualified staff, already spread thin, has to address problems immediately, not in days, weeks or months.&nbsp;</p><p>And yet, teams often wait until problems or even outages are reported before they look at individual components and system logs. This process-of-elimination troubleshooting not only degrades performance experiences, it can actually make problems worse. In pursuit of deeper, more real-time transparency, CIOs have tried a variety of approaches, with mixed results.&nbsp;</p><p>Some teams focus on application performance management (APM). They look primarily at the end-user experience, but when problems are red-flagged there, such tools lack the ability to dig deeper into the infrastructure to uncover and address the root causes. Other IT leaders emphasize device management or network operating centers above or beside APM.&nbsp;</p><p>Those tools are useful in their own silos, but ensuring a high quality of holistic service and deliverability requires IT to analyze the concentric circles in the data center's "trunk"—through every layer of infrastructure abstraction and back across the legacy technology, with an emphasis on IO. It's the fastest growing, most expensive and least understood layer in the stack, and it has the most impact on performance. To bridge the visibility gap, you will need vendor-neutral monitoring, predictive analysis tools, automated reporting mechanisms and centralized management.&nbsp;</p><h2>Helping Performance Management Take Root</h2><p>The challenge of maintaining high service in the face of massive annual data growth can be particularly difficult for older businesses, many of which have been layering on technology over several years or even decades.&nbsp;</p><p>These organizations must now use cloud-based infrastructures while competing against younger, smaller and more agile competitors that aren't burdened with legacy issues. It’s no longer sufficient to manage just one element, such as APM. All are critical to the total experience&nbsp;in their own right.&nbsp;</p><p>To start, companies must acknowledge that service-level agreements (SLAs) geared toward the server tier or the storage tier are no longer viable on their own. The SLAs should address the whole business; they have to, in order to optimize the speed of delivery, agility and cost.&nbsp;</p><p>Above all, organizations must bear in mind that, wherever&nbsp;legacy and modern systems work together, total visibility is essential. It's the sun, soil and water necessary for their data centers' health—and growth.&nbsp;</p><p><em>Hard-drive X-ray by <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/kubina/941699149">Jeff Kubina</a>; tree trunk photo by <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/ktylerconk/2472669830/in/photolist">Kathleen Conklin</a>; mainframe photo by <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/skoett/4182370780/in/photolist">Martin Skøtt</a>; data center server photo by <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/small_realm/11189803763">Bob Mical</a></em></p>What's hiding in there could hurt you.http://readwrite.com/2015/02/19/old-legacy-data-centers-mainframes-cloud-transparency
http://readwrite.com/2015/02/19/old-legacy-data-centers-mainframes-cloud-transparencyWorkThu, 19 Feb 2015 06:00:00 -0800John GentryMost U.S. Companies Under Cyberattack<!-- tml-version="2" --><div tml-image="ci01c1384b10012a83" tml-image-caption=""><figure><img src="http://a2.files.readwrite.com/image/upload/c_fill,cs_srgb,dpr_1.0,q_80,w_620/MTI2NDQ0MTU4MjQzMDg0NzY2.jpg" /><figcaption></figcaption></figure></div><p>A computer security company has written a report concluding that 82 percent of U.S. companies have experienced at least one online attack in the last year and 46 percent have experienced three or more attacks. </p><p>The report, commissioned by Malwarebytes and carried out by Lawless Research, spoke to 685 different IT “decision-makers”—primarily IT directors, managers, and CEOS—about Web security for their organizations. The respondents were from U.S. companies across a wide variety of fields, from agriculture to retail.&nbsp;</p><p>According to the report, 72 percent of the respondents said that the “number of exploitable browser vulnerabilities” was the most pressing security issue for their company, exceeding concerns about mobile security. </p><div tml-image="ci01c1388af0012a83" tml-image-caption="&lt;em&gt;Source: Malwarebytes research&lt;/em&gt;"><figure><img src="http://a4.files.readwrite.com/image/upload/c_fill,cs_srgb,w_620/MTI2NDQ0NDMzMzg5Mzk4NjU5.png" /><figcaption>&lt;em&gt;Source: Malwarebytes research&lt;/em&gt;</figcaption></figure></div><p>“Endpoints” are modes of access to the corporate network of a company and can include computers, mobile devices, tablets and even point-of-sale terminals.</p><p>Those surveyed said that the impact of such attacks was primarily a severe drain on company IT resources, with employees busy fixing malware problems rather than other projects; less than 10 percent of respondents said the issue was customer data being lost or stolen. </p><p>The report also notes an increase in the rise of ransomware, a specific kind of malware that restricts or otherwise negatively impacts a computer until a ransom is paid to the malware’s creator. Although only 15 percent of the people surveyed reported a ransomware attack of their company, respondents rated it as the highest severity threat for their company. </p><p>A McAfee Labs threats report <a href="http://www.mcafee.com/us/resources/reports/rp-quarterly-threat-q1-2014.pdf">from June</a> noted that after experiencing an enormous rise ransomware in the second quarter of 2013, McAfee data has indicated a downward trend for the malware since then. This, however, could actually signal an <em>increase</em> in ransomware in the near future. </p><p>“The number of new ransomware samples has dropped for three straight quarters,” the McAfee report said. “McAfee Labs has confirmed that the trend is not the result of an anomaly. We have several theories for why this is happening, but we haven’t pinpointed an exact cause. It’s also possible we’re seeing a trough before another increase. That has happened with many other types of malware.”</p><p>While the amount of <em>new</em> ransomware detected by McAfee has been dropping, the total amount of ransomware has risen every quarter.</p><p>Malwarebytes itself has not been immune to <a href="http://www.jbgnews.com/2014/12/malwarebytes-forums-hacked-users-asked-to-change-passwords/592601.html">security breaches</a>. According to the company, its primary website was not compromised, but the server hosting its forums was. CEO Marcin Kleczynski blamed Invision, the company hosting Malwarebytes servers. </p><p>“Invision is known for having vulnerabilities and gets exploited all the time,” Kleczynski wrote on the forums. “Unfortunately, we fell victim to that.”</p><p>In a statement provided by Malwarebytes, a spokesperson said "there was no evidence of any risk to personal information, our website or business data" and the firm suggested that its forum users reset their passwords as a precautionary measure.&nbsp;</p><p><em>Photo by <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/saxonmoseley/288741595/">Saxon Moseley</a>.</em></p>Browser vulnerabilities are the most pressing security issue, study finds.http://readwrite.com/2014/12/04/cybersecurity-corporate-networks-ransomware-cyberattack
http://readwrite.com/2014/12/04/cybersecurity-corporate-networks-ransomware-cyberattackWebThu, 04 Dec 2014 14:11:48 -0800Richard ProcterDo Fortune 500 Firms Really Operate Like Startups? Not On The Tech Front<!-- tml-version="2" --><p>Big companies talk about "operating like a startup," but few actually do. Hamstrung by bureaucracy and organizational friction, the Fortune 500 make lots of money but generally play it safe with technology, buying from the same incumbent vendors they've always used.</p><p>Or do they?</p><p>I wanted to dig into the technology choices the world's biggest companies use, and see how they compare to the technologies our leading startups use, as <a href="http://readwrite.com/2014/08/12/code-like-startup-best-technology-language-databasei-infrastructure">per Leo Polovets' findings</a>. The TL;DR? Bigger is definitely not better when it comes to technology.</p><h2>Discovering What The Fortune 500 Buys</h2><p>There is no easy way to discern the various technologies a large corporation like Chevron might be using. After all, the bigger the corporation, the more glacial its technology approval processes are likely to be as the company seeks to retain control of the flow of technology into and out of the company.&nbsp;</p><p>Within such bastions of inertia, shadow IT—that is, technology deployed without the knowledge, much less approval, of the IT department—reigns. As <a href="http://110.74.148.18/2014/04/25/shadow-it-cloud-open-source-developers.html">I've written</a>, shadow IT is at least 10 times as big as we assume. Skyhigh Networks, which helps companies root out and track shadow IT, <a href="http://www.skyhighnetworks.com/shadow-it/">found</a> companies that assume they have ~90 systems actually have over 1,000.</p><blockquote><p><strong>See also:&nbsp;<a href="http://readwrite.com/2014/04/25/shadow-it-cloud-open-source-developers">Shadow IT: Far Bigger, Less Manageable And More Important Than You Think</a></strong></p></blockquote><p>In other words, no matter what an enterprise reports in terms of technology adoption, the number is almost certainly way off. About <a href="http://readwrite.com/2014/09/03/big-data-adoption-cio-it-companies">the only thing the CIO will know</a> for sure is how much money she pours into mega-vendors like Oracle and HP each year.&nbsp;</p><h2>Jobs As A Proxy For Technology Adoption</h2><p>One way to figure out which technologies a company uses is to analyze their job postings. While imperfect for all the reasons stated above, jobs reveal significant interest in a technology, evincing more than a passing phase by a random department buried in the bowels of the corporation.&nbsp;</p><p>So who is the Fortune 500 hiring?</p><blockquote><p><strong>See also: <a href="http://readwrite.com/2014/08/12/code-like-startup-best-technology-language-databasei-infrastructure">How To Code Like A Startup</a></strong></p></blockquote><p>Using Polovets' list of hot startup technologies, and punching the top five technologies into a <a href="http://www.job-hunt.org/results-indeed.html">search of all Fortune 500 job postings</a>, along with a sixth column (where applicable) for a highly popular enterprise technology as comparison, we get the following:</p><div tml-image="ci01b7298aac33860e" tml-image-caption="Credit: Matt Asay"><figure><img src="http://a2.files.readwrite.com/image/upload/c_fill,cs_srgb,w_620/MTIzNjEzMTkwMzQ3MTMwMzgy.png" /><figcaption>Credit: Matt Asay</figcaption></figure></div><p>Not surprisingly, enterprises use proportionately less of the hottest startup technology than those startups do.&nbsp;</p><p>Take, for example, databases. Polovets' analysis of AngelList data shows huge adoption of&nbsp;MySQL and virtually none for Oracle. While MySQL has a respectable showing in Fortune 500 jobs data, its presence is a fraction of Oracle's.</p><div tml-image="ci01b529046cc5860c" tml-image-caption="Credit: Leo Polovets"><figure><img src="http://a4.files.readwrite.com/image/upload/c_fill,cs_srgb,w_620/MTE5NTU2MzIzNzk1Njk5MjEx.png" /><figcaption>Credit: Leo Polovets</figcaption></figure></div><p>Or take programming languages:</p><div tml-image="ci01a8bfd813c2860b" tml-image-caption=""><figure><img src="http://a3.files.readwrite.com/image/upload/c_fill,cs_srgb,w_620/MTE5NTU2MzI0ODkwNTQzNjI3.png" /><figcaption></figcaption></figure></div><p>Both enterprises and startups converge on Java (perhaps because of startups' use of Android?), but they're worlds apart on Javascript and C/C++.&nbsp;</p><p>Assuming startup technology is a leading indicator of tomorrow's enterprise adoption, what should the Fortune 500 be doing?</p><h2>Embrace The Shadow</h2><p>Cisco and HP are among the Fortune 500 that have figured out ways to track adoption of new technologies and embrace them. <a href="http://blogs.wsj.com/cio/2014/09/05/cisco-h-p-use-shadow-it-as-a-roadmap/?cb=logged0.4365594582632184">According to the Wall Street Journal</a>, these and other companies have turned to tools like the aforementioned Skyhigh Networks to track shadow IT.&nbsp;</p><p>But rather than block it, they're looking to embrace it.</p><p>As Rebecca Jacoby, CIO of Cisco Systems<a href="http://online.wsj.com/public/quotes/main.html?type=djn&amp;symbol=CSCO"></a>, puts it, "Some organizations use [tools] so they can stop people from doing things, but we use it to help shape our portfolios."</p><p>While it's likely easier to track services like Amazon Web Services than, say, adoption of Elasticsearch, savvy enterprises will figure out where their technology portfolios are heading by tapping into the technology their innovators are using, and embracing it.&nbsp;</p><p><em>Lead image by <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/riverap1/3875718119/">Peter Rivera</a></em></p>Guess what? They're stuck in the 1990s.http://readwrite.com/2014/09/09/fortune-500-technology-startups
http://readwrite.com/2014/09/09/fortune-500-technology-startupsWorkTue, 09 Sep 2014 06:00:00 -0700Matt AsayIT And Business: Allies At Last Against Legacy Infrastructure<!-- tml-version="2" --><p>It's easy to assume that developers, employed by lines of business, have supplanted the CIO forever.</p><p>As a recent <a href="http://www.forrester.com/Sizing+The+BusinessDriven+Tech+Market/fulltext/-/E-RES110181">Forrester report</a> uncovered, traditional, IT-led technology purchases are shrinking—from 55% To 47%. Still, with a mere 7.2% of tech purchases being driven solely by the line of business, something more profound is underway. That "something" is almost certainly a new wave of IT and business collaboration.</p><p>The CIO, in other words, is not dead yet.</p><h2>Cats And Dogs, Together At Last</h2><p>The primary driver of collaboration between IT and business is somewhat surprising. <a href="http://www.capgemini.com/resource-file-access/resource/pdf/2014-03-04_alr_v8_web_0.pdf">According to CapGemini</a>, which interviewed over 1,100 CIOs and top IT decision-makers, technology is simply too important to have one group manage it:</p><blockquote><p>[T]he gap between corporate ambitions and&nbsp;the state of the application landscape is now felt more than&nbsp;ever: it is no longer “just” a matter of cost and manageability, it&nbsp;is the indispensable role of technology as a crucial enabler&nbsp;for innovation, renewal and business expansion that now takes&nbsp;center stage.&nbsp;In this context, the alignment between Business and IT is a top&nbsp;priority.</p></blockquote><p>Both groups could view technology as a competitive differentiator without actually working together. What CapGemini's survey finds, however, is that enterprises increasingly discover that it's optimal for the two groups to work together to put technology to work most effectively. The more closely the two groups are aligned, the more IT drives the technology agenda in the company, with a real focus on competitive differentiation:</p><p></p><div tml-image="ci01b280f220018266"><figure><img src="http://a4.files.readwrite.com/image/upload/c_fill,cs_srgb,w_620/MTIyMzAxOTE2MjI2MDIyNjgx.png" /></figure></div><p>This shift from cost-cutting to real innovation has liberated IT to be a real partner to the line of business, rather than "Dr. No."</p><h2>Never Waste A Good Crisis</h2><p>Ironically, the thing forcing IT and business together has been legacy infrastructure, which continually&nbsp;hobbles new application development&nbsp;is its near-crisis state.</p><p>Enterprises want desperately to take advantage of Big Data, mobile and other trends, but their existing infrastructure hampers their ambitions. This problem, more than anything else, has aligned the two groups, as it has forced enterprises to look seriously at replacing old-world infrastructure.</p><p>As the report finds:</p><blockquote><p>Industrialization and standardization may no longer be sufficient as the pent-up demand for the next generation of applications by Business increases considerably and the pace of application landscape renewal proves to be too low.</p></blockquote><blockquote><p>Alternative rationalization strategies need to be considered in that case...[including] more radical strategies that aim for daring, impactful changes (e.g.,“ripping and replacing” legacy custom or ERP applications by highly standardized SaaS solutions). In the latter case, though, the transformative impact on the organization, its processes, its governance and its people should not be underestimated, the benefits can be considerable.</p></blockquote><p>When IT moves too slowly, or when the two teams are poorly aligned, the business side has typically embraced the cloud rather&nbsp;aggressively, something <a href="http://readwrite.com/2014/01/31/it-losing-battle-cloud-adoption-enterprise#feed=/author/matt-asay&amp;awesm=~oyosAhkwUyBWfE">ReadWrite has reported before</a>. Therefore, while CapGemini found that&nbsp;three times as many CIOs are involved in initiating 35–65% of application developments than they were three years ago, when it comes to cloud services, business leads by almost 50%.&nbsp;</p><p>Overall, however, IT and business increasingly see each other as partners in reducing cruft and improving the enterprise application portfolio.</p><p></p><div tml-image="ci01b280f270018266"><figure><img src="http://a3.files.readwrite.com/image/upload/c_fill,cs_srgb,w_620/MTIyMzAxOTE3NTY4MjA1NDE0.png" /></figure></div><p>Make no mistake: IT and business still have a long way to go to reach deep collaboration. But we're moving in the right direction. The "us" and "them" mentality is rapidly disappearing in the face of a real need to embrace the future of data. We should expect this trend to only continue.</p><p><em>Lede image courtesy of <a href="http://www.shutterstock.com">Shutterstock</a>.&nbsp;</em></p>With the enterprise bogged down with old infrastructure, business and IT teams must collaborate to embrace new trends.http://readwrite.com/2014/03/13/it-mobile-data-business-bffs
http://readwrite.com/2014/03/13/it-mobile-data-business-bffsWorkThu, 13 Mar 2014 08:43:04 -0700Matt AsayHow The IT Department Will Strike Back In 2014<!-- tml-version="2" --><p>The IT department isn't traditionally perceived as the hub for organizational innovation and growth, but it’s slowly getting there.</p><p>Gartner <a href="http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2603215">recently forecasted</a> a number of developments that will significantly impact the IT function in years to come, spanning mobile device management, hybrid cloud integration and software-defined networking. As these disruptive technologies continue to mature, IT is well-positioned to drive overall corporate success, enabling organizations’ innovative capabilities to really shine through.</p><blockquote tml-render-position="right" tml-render-size="medium"><p><strong>See also: <a href="http://readwrite.com/2014/01/31/it-losing-battle-cloud-adoption-enterprise">IT's Losing Battle Against Cloud Adoption</a></strong></p></blockquote><p>Assimilating these new technologies won't come easy, however. Lots of time and resources must be dedicated to fine-tuning these tools for unique IT environments—and that’s on top of existing “keep-the-lights-on” IT maintenance. Efficient IT management will be a key challenge over the next year, and enterprises will have to approach it much more strategically if they’re to realize the benefits of next-generation technologies.</p><p>I foresee two major developments emerging in 2014 to improve IT management: The application of big data to internal IT processes, and an evolution of the operations manager (OM). Both trends reflect more proactive IT service management strategies, which I believe will unlock the potential of disruptive enterprise technology.</p><h2>Big Data for Internal Processes</h2><p>Big data is widely recognized as a valuable tool to help understand customer behavior, particularly among the manufacturing, retail and financial sectors. We know, as an industry, that turning data into decisions is a powerful concept, so why should it be used exclusively for external stakeholders?</p><p>In 2014, organizations will open up a whole new playing field for big data, turning predictive analytics inward and applying it within the IT function to track where operational incidents happen most frequently. The real value here is that it will enable IT and network admins to track patterns in the operating environment and, based on those patterns, create more accurate thresholds for recurring issues or events. As a result, businesses can better predict and perhaps prevent IT incidents before they happen, ensuring better overall uptime and performance.</p><blockquote tml-render-position="right" tml-render-size="medium"><p><strong>See also: <a href="http://readwrite.com/2014/02/11/devops-future-diy-it-gartner-nosql">DevOps: The Future Of DIY IT?</a></strong></p></blockquote><p>Data is everywhere, so collecting it is perhaps the easiest part. The challenge is translating that data into actionable knowledge.</p><p>All the data available to us means nothing if it’s not concentrated, sorted and organized in a way that’s useful to create meaningful insights or inform decision making. Integrating analytics into an IT management console can make this a more seamless process, especially when the system can automatically respond to threshold alerts and deploy a corresponding action, all before the incident even occurs.</p><p>Resource availability and performance are two obvious benefits of big data analytics in IT. By analyzing where issues occur in the network or IT infrastructure, organizations can discover which problems need to be addressed, thereby reducing instances of performance degradation and bandwidth over-consumption, for example.</p><p>More important, though, is the speed at which these results can occur. As an example, let’s take a look at the financial services market and the management of trading applications. Without the aid of big data analytics, a system administrator might take up to an hour to figure out why a new trade failed to execute. Meanwhile, the trade has decreased in value and the revenue opportunity is lost, all because of a slow infrastructure analysis process. With greater volumes of transactions and more decisions made within compressed timeframes, admins can collect enough data to address the factors that cause slow or failed transactions, and eventually prevent them from happening at all.</p><h2>Evolution of the Operations Manager</h2><p>IT can—and should—prepare their systems for events that are easy to predict; for example, preparing websites with extra capacity during regular or expected periods of peak traffic (and they can also address recurring issues, such as the financial trade execution).</p><p>But with the complexity of today’s converged infrastructures, there will always be unexpected circumstances and new problems that arise. Here is where the operations manager (OM) will play a significant role.</p><blockquote tml-render-position="right" tml-render-size="medium"><p><strong>See also: <a href="http://readwrite.com/2014/01/30/big-data-better-good-luck-understanding-study">More Big Data Is Better, But Good Luck Understanding It All</a></strong></p></blockquote><p>Traditionally, OMs were confined to break-fix roles, responsible only for reacting to these unpredictable problems as they arose in an IT environment. These expectations will evolve as cloud usage ramps up and <a href="http://cloudtweaks.com/2013/09/cloud-computing-growth/">60% of server workloads</a>&nbsp;are virtualized by the end of 2014. The rate of incoming service requests will increase exponentially, so managing those incidents will have to be much more systematic.</p><p>Under this increased pressure, we’ll begin to see the OM’s role expand beyond purely break-fix tasks to include more application support, including resource procurement and provisioning. This might require, for instance, adding more virtual machines, bandwidth, CPU or memory in response to infrastructure capacity shortages. Moving away from mere execution, the OM will become more of a strategic contributor—a resource manager and critical business unit.</p><p>For the next-generation OM, automation will be a necessary tool. Availability monitoring and performance assurance in today’s IT landscape simply cannot be accomplished by human efforts alone, and automation gives the OM a method to provision on demand. By setting triggers that correspond to automated actions, the operations team can track usage in real-time, which is supported by automation that increases resources if and when they are needed.</p><p>As IT infrastructure becomes increasingly dynamic, it’s critical that operations stay ahead of the curve. Backed by unified monitoring and automation tools, the OM can move from a reactive role into more proactive management, ensuring that growing volumes of IT issues are responded to immediately. As a result, they can significantly free up time to focus on integrating the technologies of tomorrow and driving true business innovation.</p><h2>IT Moves Off The Bench And Onto The Playing Field</h2><blockquote tml-render-position="right" tml-render-size="medium"><p><strong>See also:&nbsp;<a href="http://readwrite.com/2014/02/17/hadoop-adoption-big-data-small-bytes">The Key For Hadoop Adoption: Learning To Make Big Data Small</a></strong></p></blockquote><p>As innovative technologies bombard the enterprise, IT management has to keep up the pace—in fact, its performance will dictate whether new technologies can be accommodated at all.</p><p>Improving IT efficiency has been an enduring goal on most organizations’ agendas, but I think our industry’s mentality around efficiency is finally beginning to shift. It’s no longer about providing the nuts and bolts when something goes awry. Now, it’s about elevating IT’s position within an organization in order to take a more strategic approach.</p><p>Whether it’s planning ahead of breakage issues, or ensuring resources are in place when they’re needed, the IT function is going to have to step up to the plate. The good news is, they won’t have to do it alone. As quickly as disruptive technologies are evolving, so are back-end management technologies. Together, with IT as a tactical leader and automation in support, 2014 should see a boom in disruptive capabilities that 2013 had yet to show.</p><p><em>Lead image by <a href="http://www.shutterstock.com">Shutterstock</a></em></p>More dynamic and efficient than ever before, IT has the power to support more disruptive technologies in 2014.http://readwrite.com/2014/02/25/it-management-department-strike-back-2014
http://readwrite.com/2014/02/25/it-management-department-strike-back-2014WorkTue, 25 Feb 2014 06:03:00 -0800Jonathan CraneDevOps: The Future Of DIY IT?<!-- tml-version="2" --><p>If Gartner's recent poll of NoSQL database adopters is any indication, traditional IT is dead. Not just a little bit dead. Dead dead.</p><p>According to the&nbsp;<a href="http://blogs.gartner.com/nick-heudecker/nosql-shouldnt-mean-nodba/">Gartner poll</a>, a scant 5.5%&nbsp;of NoSQL users&nbsp;identified themselves as DBAs that run their businesses operating on those storage systems. The survey was small, but it might point to a larger trend: Do-it-yourself (DIY) IT, or DevOps.</p><h2>DevOps Rising</h2><p>DevOps is sometimes characterized as developers reigning over operations, but that's not really the case. Rather, as <a href="http://radar.oreilly.com/2012/06/what-is-devops.html">Mike Loukides suggests</a>, "Operations doesn’t go away, it becomes part of the development." Application developers, increasingly running in cloud environments, take on more traditional operations responsibilities with Ops becoming part of the application.&nbsp;</p><p>It's catching on. As Microsoft's <a href="https://twitter.com/timpark/status/432901759002886144">Tim Park declares</a>, DevOps is "the new normal" given that "infrastructure is too complex now to manage with humans," requiring "automation of everything."</p><p>The numbers agree.&nbsp;Since 2011, DevOps adoption has increased 26%, according to a 2013 <a href="http://info.puppetlabs.com/2013-state-of-devops-report.html">survey by Puppet Labs</a>. The rise in DevOps also translates into the ability to ship code 30X faster. All of which is expressed in a separate <a href="http://www.ca.com/us/news/press-releases/na/2013/devops-driving-20-percent-faster-timetomarket-for-new-services-global-it-study-reveals.aspx">CA Technologies survey</a> of senior IT decision-makers, which found that improvements to the customer experience are by far the biggest reasons enterprises are embracing DevOps. &nbsp;</p><p>So what happens now to the traditional IT Operations professional?</p><h2>Who Is Running This Stuff?</h2><p>The answer is, of course, that it's unclear. But looking at Gartner's data, the numbers don't bode well for traditional operations:</p><p></p><div tml-image="ci01b280d240006d19"><figure><img src="http://a4.files.readwrite.com/image/upload/c_fill,cs_srgb,dpr_1.0,q_80,w_620/MTIyMzAxNzc5MzIzOTQwMTIx.jpg" /></figure></div><p>Commenting on the data, Gartner analyst Nick&nbsp;Heudecker&nbsp;notes: "DBAs simply aren’t a part of the NoSQL conversation. This means DBAs, intentionally or not, are being eliminated from a rapidly growing area of information management." While&nbsp;Heudecker is talking specifically about DBAs and NoSQL databases, this same trend is playing out across the IT spectrum.&nbsp;</p><p>Developers are the new kingmakers, as Redmonk's <a href="http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2010/09/09/the-new-kingmakers/">Stephen O'Grady reminds us</a>. They do Ops differently.</p><p>Not that this is without problems.&nbsp;In my experience, developers are often unprepared or unwilling to take on the burden of managing their applications in production. Trained for years on the idea that they could build an application and dump it on Operations to manage, developers are discovering that the “Ops” in DevOps is real, and sometimes painful.</p><p>Heudecker captures this concern:&nbsp;"Application developers may be getting what they want from NoSQL now, but cutting out the primary data stewards will result in long-term data quality and information governance challenges for the larger enterprise."</p><h2>Ops By Another Name</h2><p>Such issues will need to be tackled by the rising generation of DevOps professionals. But let's be clear: It's too late to go back to the old way of managing IT. CSC's <a href="http://blog.gardeviance.org/2013/01/the-next-generation.html">Simon Wardley posits</a> that we're well into a "Next Generation" approach to IT, one that elevates developers and significantly changes the role of traditional IT Ops. Given the crushing need for development speed, there simply is no other way.</p><p><em>Lead image courtesy of <a href="http://devopsdays.org/">DevOpsDays</a>, lower image courtesy of Gartner</em></p>New Gartner research confirms what we've long suspected: traditional IT is dead and DevOps is booming.http://readwrite.com/2014/02/11/devops-future-diy-it-gartner-nosql
http://readwrite.com/2014/02/11/devops-future-diy-it-gartner-nosqlWorkTue, 11 Feb 2014 06:15:17 -0800Matt Asay